Humor

Who said the secular liberal media don't have religion? Just ask the Baltimore Sun, which is offering eco-absolution of a sort for readers who confess their greatest "eco sin" to the editors of their environmentalist blog.

What follows is Kim Walker's September 18 entry, "What's your biggest eco sin?" at the Sun's B'More Green blog:

I wrote earlier today about being initially hesitant about switching to a low flow showerhead. Water (over)usage is my biggest eco sin. And every time I soak in a hot bath after a long day at work, I swear it'll be my last.

Nancy Pelosi glares in Joe Wilson's direction.  September 9, 2009.

A half hour after wrapping up his on-air duties for the day, MSNBC's David Shuster took to his Twitter account to insist that he is biased, in favor of the truth:

Posted around 5:30 p.m. EDT to his Twitter account:

To all of the wing-nuts who are resorting to the usual tweets today: I am biased in favor of FACTS and biased against lies.

The Weekly Standard’s September 14 issue parodied the Washington Post for its biased, obsessive coverage of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, wryly featuring a mock headline that read: "Post Runs Another Story About Its McDonnell Story: Stories to run until ‘controversy’ takes on life of its own, sources say." [Emphasis added]

The Washington Post has published 12 pieces in 11 days highlighting a 1989 Regent University thesis by the Republican about the traditional family structure. The spot-on Weekly Standard parody spoofed, "Three days after publishing a story in hopes of generating a controversy over a master’s thesis written 20 years ago by GOP gubernatorial hopeful Bob McDonnell, The Washington Post will publish another story today about the reaction to its original story, the Washington Post has learned."

First Lady Hillary Clinton, in 1994, displays a pamphlet about her health care plan bearing an image of the "health security card" every American would supposedly receive. Photo AP.

On a summer Saturday night, with NBC continuing to run SNL re-runs, I'm catching up with a liberal media bias theme from earlier in August in the conservative online comic strip, “The Gentleman from Lickskillet,” by Allen and Tuma. Back in April they also had a week featuring the 'Mouthful' TV show with guest Howland Fonebone of 'Group Think' magazine.

The August 3-8 strips revolved around the “unbiased newsmagazine.” In one entry, an editor looking for a “wide range of opinion,” wonders whether the magazine should run “more stories on the President and his beautiful family?”or “more stories supporting the President's agenda?” or “more stories exposing the President's corrupt opponents?”

Sounds just like a staff meeting at Time or Newsweek.

You might call it a decided understatement. Still, it was refreshing to hear a member of the White House press corps state an inconvenient truth about Pres. Obama: that he is under-supplied in the sense of humor department.

Julie Mason, White House correspondent of the Washington Examiner, offered the observation this afternoon on MSNBC. She was on to discuss the awkward situation created by the separate meetings with Pres. Obama that Hillary and Bill Clinton are having this afternoon.

When Monica Novotny asked whether PBO might take the occasion to rib her about her sharp response to the student in the Congo who asked about Bill's views, Mason offered her candid comment.

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton in Nairobi, Kenya, during her recent African trip.

Released American journalists, Laura Ling, in green, and Euna Lee, in red, are greeted by former U.S. President Bill Clinton as they board a plane bound for the United States in Pyongyang, North Korea.  (AP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News Service)

"Don't get me wrapped up in a menage-a-trois here."

That's how NBC "Today" show co-host Meredith Vieira cracked a tasteless joke to prevent viewers from mistakenly assuming she is married to former NBC "Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw.

The comment came shortly before 9 a.m. on the August 3 program, following the close of an "American Character" piece narrated by Brokaw from Cincinnati, Ohio, some "642 miles down" and "2,431 to go" along historic U.S. Route 50.:

Sgt. James Crowley and Pres. Barack Obama during the White House beer summit, July 30, 2009.  AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Overcompensation: (psychiatry) an attempt to overcome a real or imagined defect or unwanted trait by overly exaggerating its opposite.

Today brings a prime example of the phenomenon in the person of Brian Williams, overcompensating for his image as a pampered straight arrow by joking about having a vast staff of servants, looking forward to the prospect of watching some nude male swimming, and, yes, doing meth to get going in the morning.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and staunch champion of government medicine a la the Canadian model of our neighbors to the north. 

Just this past Saturday in "Toyota, Moving Northward" he flogged the advantages of the single-payer system Canada offers.  He postulated that one reason why the Japanese auto maker is locating it's new RAV4 plant in Ontario is their government medicine:

Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.

Suddenly Krugman the Leftist is all for huge government subsidies for big business. 

Krugman's Nobel-prize winning economic mind then offers up:

So what's the impact on taxpayers? In Canada, there's no impact at all: since all Canadians get government-provided health insurance in any case, the additional auto jobs won't increase government spending.

Really?  Adding workers brought in from outside Canada to the government rolls won't increase government spending?  A little of Krugman's new math: X plus 5,000 still somehow equals X.  

The TVNewser blog alerted me to Katie Couric’s “Notebook” item yesterday, in which she mocks the New York Times for making “not one, not two, but seven errors” in their remembrance of the late Walter Cronkite last week. TVNewser suggested Couric may have trying to get “payback” for an anti-Couric piece that the Times’s Alessandra Stanley wrote four years ago when Couric worked at NBC:

Wow. This is good. In her 'Notebook' on CBSNews.com, Katie Couric takes down New York Times columnist Alessandra Stanley, and she does it in the cruelest of ways: without mentioning her by name....There is no love lost between the anchor and the columnist. The most memorable Stanley story on Couric may be this 2005 take-down of the then-Today show anchor: "At the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights," Stanley wrote about Couric.

Well, this might be Couric's payback. And just look at the smile on her face during the segment...

Couric sounded pretty high and mighty in her take-down of the Times: “As we say goodbye to the dean of TV news, let's all remember as journalists when as we say, 'That's the way it is,' it really is.” But a few years ago, Couric utterly embarrassed herself in a Today interview with Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham, as she quoted extensively from an obvious parody of Graham’s habit of diary-keeping. Apparently clueless to the fact that she was quoting a made-up story, Couric confronted Graham: “What, what do you do this for?!” (Video above; audio available here.)

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton meets with Indian opposition leader Lal Krishna Advani in New Delhi on July 20, 2009. Photo Reuters/B. Mathur

Gene Weingarten has established himself as a Dick Cheney-hater, since he has compared him to Cambodian communist mass murderer Pol Pot. The "investigative humorist" and former editor of the Post’s Style section is at it again Sunday, with a splenetic and allegedly humorous venting against Cheney an an unholy, murderous savage.

The setup is Cheney’s forthcoming memoirs. He called up the publisher, Simon and Schuster’s Threshhold Editions, and they asked if he was "pro-book," meaning pro-Cheney. When he wouldn’t answer, the publisher would only answer to questions submitted in writing. This gave him an excuse to joke that he wouldn’t be biased or unprofessional, and then laid out all his Cheney hatred. Here’s a piece of it:

3. May I presume that Mr. Cheney will be remunerated in his customary way: a gunnysack filled with unblemished human heads?

Vice-President Joe Biden, July 16, 2009. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. on Capitol Hill, Thursday, July 9, 2009. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

In yet another moment of Obama puffery the "Today" show highlighted a hotel dedicated to Barack Obama. During a segment headlined: "Hotel Obama, Small Country Goes Wild For President," NBC's Mara Schiavocampo, on Friday's "Today," showcased a new hotel in Ghana named after the President that is run by a former campaign worker and joined her as she took viewers on a room-by-room tour devoted to places and people important in Obama's life history [audio excerpt available here]:

MARA SCHIAVOCAMPO: It's run by Ghanaian-American Coretta Owusu, whose father owns the business. She worked for this Obama during the campaign and then moved to Ghana to work for this one. It's a budget conscious hotel featuring 18 themed rooms priced at $60 to $100.

CORETTA OWUSU, HOTEL MANAGER: And this room is the Obama suite. Most people stay here if they come for a special occasion or they're coming with their family. Well we have Michelle Obama right next to Barack Obama. Across from Obama it's Joe Biden's room.

In the run-up to the Inauguration, Newsweek held a competition (apparently canceled) to dress mean, robotic-looking paper dolls of Bush and Cheney and declare what they would do after high office in "Give These Men a Job." Now, its corporate cousin The Washington Post is declaring on Friday a new contest urging readers to imagine the first paragraph of Dick Cheney’s memoirs, as he’s just been signed by Mary Matalin’s Threshold brand at Simon & Schuster. The headline announcing the contest on the back page of the Style section was "It Was a Dark and Stormy Eight Years." The Post’s sample first paragraph is jokey, but really cheesy:

“David Letterman is making a full-throated apology for his controversial joke about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter,” TV Week reported a short while ago. “During a taping of tonight's [Monday 6/15] edition of his CBS Late Show, Letterman went much further than his last explanation of the joke, in which he quipped that a baseball player had 'knocked up' Palin's daughter,” Josef Adalian wrote.

Though Palin and conservatives were outraged and demanded an apology and retraction for a “joke” seemed aimed at the 14-year-old daughter though Letterman said he was referring to the 18-year-old daughter, it took the liberal columnist Mark Shields on PBS to convince Letterman he had a problem. Letterman will explain (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

I have had it with Letterman! I used to defend this guy to all of my friends who liked Leno better. I would say from a comic stand point that Jay was a great comic but Letterman was more original and had more style and class than Leno. Two recent events have changed my mind: Jay’s classy departure from the “Tonight Show” and Letterman’s classless left-wing attacks on the kids of politicians.

A comic needs to be an equal opportunity offender. We can’t pick sides in politics. We can have a point of view and a favorite but being a comic means when our guy drops the ball, you have to pick it up and smash it in his face. My friend and political opposite, Will Durst, said this a few years back about Mort Saul (I am paraphrasing here), “You can’t sit down to dinner with the Reagans and then pretend you’re still willing to sling mud at them.”

That is what is wrong with comedians like Letterman, Garofalo, and Stewart. They only see one side. Why do none of them at least give love taps to Obama? Why didn’t at least one of them make some comedic hay out of Obama gaffs like “57 states” and a reference to speaking “Austrian?”

The guy is the President and he can’t shake his mother-in-law and you can’t find a joke in that?

Pres. Obama speaks at the American Memorial in Normandy, June 6, 2009. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monisvais)

NBC host Matt Lauer interviewed Sarah Palin on June 12, and defended comedian David Letterman and his joke about the statutory rape of Palin’s daughter by baseball player Alex Rodriguez.
 
When Palin began to condemn the joke as wildly inappropriate and offensive, Lauer defended Letterman: “Since David Letterman’s not here, let me just say that he did not mention Willow by name, and he then went on to say he was not referring to your 14-year-old daughter,” as though to Lauer the excuse diminished the vile nature of Letterman’s joke.

 At the end of the segment, Lauer did admit that, “a lot of people feel the joke was in extremely bad taste, no matter which daughter of yours he was referring to,”  but not before Palin pointed out that, “regardless, it was a degrading comment about a young woman,” and no joke of that nature should be tolerated, no matter how old the victim of the joke is.